He had pushed his way roughly through the throng now, brushing the reporters aside with especial impatience, and stood whispering, gasping his tidings in Beekman’s ear. The assemblage, silent now as the midnight watch, read in the deepening shadows and shocked severity of the Boss’s face that something far out of the ordinary had happened. Beekman appeared to be asking some questions, and pondering the whispered answers with increasing emotion.
The waiting hundreds, all on their feet now, watched him in a tremor of expectation.
At last he spoke, in a low, changed, yet extremely distinct voice:
“Mr. Cheerman, when I spoke abaout sayin’ nothin’ but good o’ th’ dead, I spoke unbeknaown to myself like a prophet. My friend here brings some awful news. Mr. Fairchild o’ Dearborn has jest been faound, stark ’n’ cold, crunched under his hosses ’n’ carriage, at the bottom of Tallman’s ravine!”
CHAPTER XXV.—“YOU THOUGHT I DID IT!”
WHEN Seth awoke next morning, the position of the shadow cast by the thick green-paper curtain which covered the upper half of his window, told his practised faculties that it was very late, and impelled him to get out of bed, before he began at all to remember the several momentous events of the previous evening. As he dressed he strove to get these arranged in their proper order in his mind. Curiously enough there were certain inchoate recollections of feminine screams, of bursts of hysterical sobbing, of low but rough and strange male voices, doleful and haunting, which confusedly struggled for place in his sleepy thoughts, and seemed now to be a part of the evening’s occurrences, now to belong to this present morning, and to have come to him while he was nearing the end of his sleep.
As he passed his Aunt Sabrina’s door on his way to the stairs, he heard from within this same sound of suppressed weeping. This much at least of the unlocated recollections must have belonged to the first stages of his waking. “Another quarrel with Isabel!” he thought, as he descended the stairs. “Why is it that women must always be rowing it with each other!” Then his own dispute with Albert came fresh and overpowering in distinctness of impression across his mind, and the grounds of his grievance against the temper of the other sex faded away.
The living-room was vacant—the breakfast table still standing in the disorder of a meal just finished, and the shades down as though the day had not yet begun, although the clock showed it to be past ten. One of the folding doors of the parlor was open and he heard Isabel’s voice—it struck him as being strangely altered toward harshness of fibre—calling him to enter.